Washing and soaking rice helps reduce harmful lead and cadmium to safe levels, but it doesn’t cut down arsenic enough to make it safe from cancer risk.

Washing rice before cooking and using lots of water (like boiling it like pasta) removes more harmful metals like arsenic and lead than just cooking it in a small amount of water — so rinsed cooking is better at making rice safer to eat.

Washing your rice and wheat with three times as much water as grain before cooking can wash away some harmful arsenic, which might lower your chance of getting cancer if you eat these foods every day.

Eating rice might increase cancer risk in people from Guyana and Chile because of arsenic in the rice — especially in Guyana, where the risk is high enough to be a real concern.

Soaking your rice for longer—like 12 hours instead of just 1—can wash out more of the bad stuff like arsenic and lead, making your rice safer to eat.

If you soak your rice in water overnight and then throw out that water before cooking, you’ll end up with rice that has less of the harmful arsenic your body can absorb.